Becoming Badass is my way of documenting my journey towards the badass. Whatever the hell that ends up meaning for a middle class wife and mom of two.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Dear Insane Clown Posse Lady

Dear Insane Clown Posse lady:

You took over the lobby of the soccer club meeting last week with your rant on how the kids we see hanging around in parks are all devotees of the Insane Clown Possee and how they’re all going to kill us in our beds. I’d like you to know that 1) I’m pretty sure that everyone in the room under the age of 7 (and boy were there a lot of them) didn’t need to hear your rant, and B) Your call to action isn’t really going to go anyway and 3) Yeah...you’re crazy.

I’ve sort of suspected this for awhile- it’s a small town and I recognize that I’m going to run into you a lot. That’s okay. I like to think of you in capital letters- the way I think of Dude Who Wears a Dress Downtown and Isn’t Fooling Anyone or That Mom with the Wig or Scary Nature Lady. For a long time I’d dubbed you In Charge of Everything Mom- but now I’ve renamed you- Insane Clown Possee Lady.

So today when I ran into you again in the lobby at the Music Hut (waiting for our kids to come out of choir), I sort of wondered where you’d go with it. Would you continue on the ICP rant or would you pick up a different thread? Would it be antibiotics in the milk? Slutty Halloweed Costumes -you touched on that one briefly last week so maybe you were testing the waters? Trying out new material ?

Nope. You really topped yourself this time. And you did it in front of my 10 year old. So let me take just a moment to thank you for teaching my kid about the following words and ideas:

1.Adultery: Calling the mother of one of his friends “a slut” by name, as in “Max’s mom is such slut, which is the only reason she still has that job”- nice touch by the way. Now not only do I have to define the word for him, but I also have to unpack the idea that successful women are assumed to have slept their way to their success (“But mama, you’re successful, right? That’s what dad always tells people. So who did you sleep with? And why does sleeping with someone matter?”) and that “sleeping with” is a euphamism for sex (“Do you have to sleep? I don’t remember that part, Mama. Where did the sleeping come in again?”) Add also the words “Whore” and “Manwhore.”

2.“Pot head” “Doobie” “Druggie” and “Wasted”: Yes, I know you were trying to share your anger and frustration over what you perceive as a lack of consequences for a public official who made a bad choice. We, on the other hand, used that whole story as a way to teach about compassion and second chances and about how people are more than their last bad choice. Now I get to teach all about hypocrisy and bigotry and narrow mindedness. By the way- that official? Kind of a hero for my kid. A big hero. A person we sort of love and respect. So yeah...thanks for that.

3.White Trash: Talking about one school in town as the “White Trash” school, even when your kid is one of the students there, is not really useful. Yes, the schools have different populations but your need to define them by the lowest common denominators of race, class and affluence sort of sucks ass. Actually, not sort of. It sucks ass. My kid was sort of clueless about his school’s identity as “The Rich School” which it isn’t- we give away coats and meals and subsidize field trips for about half the students through the PTA.

So...thanks for all of that. I’ll get a week’s worth of bedtime conversations out of your 20 minute rant (thank God I took him to get his hair cut first. I hate to think about what would have happened if we’d been there the whole time). I’m still trying to explain why those clowns are crazy and why they felt the need to form a possee. And why they’d want to kill us in our beds in the first place.